The purpose of this course is to introduce you to current global challenges in conservation and development, including changes in both sectors. This course will inspire you to rethink assumptions to address global challenges in conservation and development, and introduce you to new models and approaches that harness technological, behavioral, and financial innovation. This course will equip you with the insights, skills and approaches necessary to successfully overcome these obstacles. In addition, this course will provide participants with the tools, models, and approaches to address global grand challenges in conservation and development, to question fundamental assumptions, and to create and execute new solutions. Course participants will be trained in the processes around innovation and design to address global grand challenges. This includes content focused on constructing innovation pipelines, principals of design and engineering unique to the developing world and to conservation (Design for the Other 90%), on harnessing and developing disruptive technologies, principles of behavior and marketing, and on overcoming the challenges with setting up social ventures.
The course format will facilitate the development of a global community of innovators who will help solve the current and future grand challenges our planet faces in conservation and development, and will encourage thinking about how to do so that rethinks traditional assumptions and approaches within both conservation and development. This course will leverage the incredible idealism and interest in social entrepreneurship, design, and innovation among the millennials, in the US and abroad, and is intended to appeal to those interested in the maker movement. It also seeks to engage individuals in the developing world who are closest to the problems of conservation and development, who would benefit from the approaches taught in the course, and who can leverage their own knowledge of local culture.

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Grand Challenges of Development

Most stereotypes of the developing world paint a simple picture of a subsistence farmer with impoverished children. However, when we dig deeper into the data, we find the developing world exhibits substantial complexity that belies traditional stereotypes. In fact, many of our assumptions about the developing world and how to address its problems may be wrong. In this module we will review, with lectures and interviews with some of the world’s best experts on the subject, many of the Grand Challenges of Development—food security, global heath, governance & the rule of law, and response to humanitarian disasters. We will also review the global development-industrial complex, and how it both benefits and undermines the development aspirations of nation-states. Finally, this module engages deeply with two important development case studies: the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, from those who have been at the front lines of the humanitarian response to these tragedies. To get started, begin by watching the video "Paradoxes in Development."